SOURCE: "The Augustans: Prior," in English Lyric in the Age of Reason, pp. 46-56. London: Daniel O'Connor, 1922.

In the following excerpt, Doughty discusses the influence of earlier poets on Prior as well as works by Prior that display a striking modernity.

Prior lives to-day, not even by his clever and formerly much admired Ode sur la Prise de Namur, but by his light occasional verse. Though Johnson failed to do him justice, Cowper at once stepped into the breach, and admirably defended his idol.¹ "Prior's," says Thackeray, also picking up the glove which Johnsonhad thrown down, "seem to me amongst the easiest, the richest, the most charmingly humorus of English lyrical poems."² Though by his collaboration in The Country Mouse and the City Mouse Prior had, according to Spence,³ reduced the ageing Dryden to tears, he followed in his Pindaric odes, before the close of the seventeenth century...